Mikael Pettersson pointed out that this really has less to do with immutable local variables and more to do with the lack of a let expression. That was insightful, and since a let expression can be considered syntactic sugar for a lambda expression, I realized that a parse transform could provide let like functionality. Let is a reserved keyword in Erlang so I used lyet instead.

You must provide at least one argument to lyet:lyet. All but the last argument to lyet:lyet must be an assignment, and the last argument has to be a single expression (but you can use begin and end for a block of expressions inside the lyet). As you can see above, you can reuse a variable name across the assignment arguments to lyet:lyet. You can even use lyet:lyet on the right hand side of the assignments, or as part of the expression argument. Some examples of usage are present in the unit test.

Update: per Ulf's suggestion, the parse transform also recognizes the local call let_ in addition to the remote call lyet:lyet. It definitely looks nicer with let_.

About the open source software discussed here.

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